HHS Secretary Tom Price, M.D., told lawmakers this week that some of the research being conducted by AHRQ is also being done by the National Institutes of Health, a sign that the two could be merged. NIH would face an 18% funding cut under President Donald Trump's recent proposed budget.

Healthcare quality advocates and supporters of the agency said they don't see the potential funding cuts and merger as a sign of ill-will toward the agency, rather a misunderstanding of what it does, STAT reported.

“When you think about how many taxpayer dollars are spent to pay for healthcare under any scenario — Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP — to not invest a tiny amount of money to understand how to improve the quality of care seems so ill-advised and shortsighted,” Lisa Simpson, chief executive of Academy Health, told STAT.

Fecal transplants should be considered for patients with recurrent cases of Clostridium difficile whose symptoms cannot be addressed by antibiotics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America said in new guidelines published Thursday.

Lawmakers took a long-standing industry complaint to the Department of Health and Human Services this week, telling Secretary Alex Azar that Medicare and Medicaid favor opioid prescription over non-addictive alternatives for treating chronic pain.